Camera+ 1.2 available with exclusive Touch Exposure feature

[Camera+ exclusive] Touch Exposure: set exposure separately from focus for the ultimate control of your shots (touch with a second finger to control exposure)

[Camera+ exclusive] Touch Focus: better than tap to focus because you can continuously drag the focus box around until your shots are in perfect focus

[Camera+ exclusive] Photo Flashlight: use the iPhone 4 LED flash as a continuous fill light to improve photo quality, especially for portrait and macro shots

speed of photo taking is now lightning fast

the high quality zoom control now works on iOS 4

stabilizer improvements

detailed metadata is now uploaded to photos shared on Flickr

fixed a bug where the camera shutter button would stop functioning

fixed a bug where photos wouldn’t display in the Lightbox on an iPad when in 2× magnification mode #weird

various minor bug fixes and enhancements

Touch Exposure (and Focus)

The biggest and best thing in this version is our exclusive Touch Exposure feature (along with a big improvement over Apple’s great Tap to Focus, which we call Touch Focus). I’ll allow the lovely Lisa Bettany to demonstrate this awesome new feature which will help you dramatically improve your photos…

So, you basically touch with a second finger to show the exposure control, then drag it until you get your shot exactly the way you want it. Dragging to a dark area will make the overall photo lighter and vice-versa.

We know you’re going to love this new addition.

Photo Flashlight

In addition to the standard LED flash controls that your iPhone 4 has, we’ve added a nifty mode where you can use the light in continuous mode. This is great for those times when the full flash is just too much and works perfectly for “fill lighting”.

Oh, and what the hell… for those times when you just need a flashlight to light your way, simply switch it on and save 99¢ on a dedicated flashlight app!

Much faster shooting

We’ve dramatically sped-up taking photos in this version. If you felt that the previous versions of Camera+ were a little laggy in that regard, you’ll have a whole new opinion on it with this new version. You can take a whole string of shots in a row and hardly notice any delay.

Whoopsie!

It seems that some of you noticed in our recent teaser video that Lisa snapped a pic with the volume buttons on the camera. We were trying to highlight Touch Exposure, but a few of you with keener eyes picked-up on this little mistake of ours… and tweeted and retweeted about it. This is actually a feature that we had in the first version of Camera+ that we submitted to Apple. The very version that some of you may remember got rejected. You probably realize now that that was the feature that actually got the app rejected.

We’re still using the feature in our test builds of the app and we love it. We call it VolumeSnap. But we’re not able to include this great feature in the app because Apple doesn’t allow us to change the functionality of the volume buttons, unfortunately.

So our plea to you, if you’d like to see this great feature in a future version of Camera+, is to tell Apple that you want it. Here’s the link to use (“Enhancement Request” is probably the best feedback type to choose for this):

We’ve been creating top-notch apps since the App Store first opened. Our apps are used by literally tens of millions of people in all corners of the world. A few of our favorite and most popular apps we’ve created are:

@Mike:
Camera+ tags photos with location meta data for uploading if you share a photo to flickr/twitter from within Camera+ — of course we’d love to make it so that same metadata is exported to your camera roll when you save a photo… Sadly, that isn’t possible under the current version of the iPhone SDK, but trust me when I say the moment it is possible it will be added to Camera+

@Richard Haber - she tapped the button that switches from the rear camera to the front-facing camera on the iPhone 4 - it’s nothing special, it’s the same button you find in the iPhone 4 Apple Camera app

Yep same here as @Palaemon it looks like the switch from front facing to rear facing camera icon is portrait then when you switch to landscape you still see the portrait icon and now a new landscape icon over the top of it.

Also Im not sure if this is a limitation to the rear facing camera (self portrait), but the tap to focus doesn’t seem to work. Otherwise this is a really sweet update!

The update looks great
I have one issue when I try to sync the photos I have taken with Camera+ to iPhoto as the photos are not displayed in iPhoto. When my iPhone is plugged I can actually see all of the items from the Camera Roll of the phone but can’t see the pictures. What I get is a dashed square for each item with the name of the item.
Am I the only one experiencing that issue?
Thanks!

Really love Camera+ - I use the camera on my iPhone *so* much more than I ever did before using this app. Quick question - the new second-touch exposure with v1.2 doesn’t seem to work for me; touch focus works fine, but nothing at all happens with the second touch (I’m doing exactly what Lisa’ video demo shows)… I have an iPhone 3GS with IOS3.1.3… IOS4 vs IOS3 issue? Apart from that, love your work!

The volume buttons are what I use to control the volume of whatever audio is playing. If you were allowed to take that away from us users it would inevitably hurt your sales.

It would make the iPhone seem defective to non tech savvy users if they run your app and the volume buttons stop responding because someone did a functionality override. And the coincidence of your app running AND the volume buttons misbehaving would lead to bad press as well as negative reviews.

In playing with my iPhone as though I had that feature, it seems to that adding shutter to volume would increase the risk of camera shake. Every time I pressed the volume the camera rotated slightly. I’m pretty much with Frank on this one.

However, it gives you the opportunity to build an add on gizmo with a button and scroll wheel on it.

Please give us a setting that goes right into the full view instead of the “cameramode” - for alot of users its a time-waster to get the cam/lightbox menu first because we want to take pictures - fast - thats the reason I still use the built in cam app when its snapshot time.

The camera isn’t working for me since the update, when open, it takes a snapshot of the camera, and keep it still even if I do zoom or move the iPhone it keeps showing the same image. But if press the shutter button it takes a photo of what it should be showing in the preview.
[iPhone 3G]

Great update. I love the app and now it’s even better. How about export to DropBox in addition to Twitter/Facebook/Flickr. I use DropBox as a way to move photos from my Camera Roll to my other computers over wifi. Would be great to be able to do this right from my Lightbox, especially if it would retain location data.

Awesome update to Camera+ 1.2. Went ahead and submitted a comment to Apple regarding the allowance of VolumeSnap and EXIF geodata to be applied to the camera roll.

Noticed a bug of moving from portrait to landscape… Looks like the buttons for front vs rear facing camera and flash modes rotate as expected, but portrait buttons still stay on screen, causing a weird overlay. Will submit a screenshot of my screen as an example.

No offense but the lightbox is the worst feature of this application. It makes dealing with pictures a multistep process when it shouldn’t be and the user interface is clunky at best. Is the Sdk metadata issue because you’re not saving directly to the camera roll as you probably should be?

At the main screen there is a button on the right side, I remember pushing it before and it would take a picture, now it does not and or sometimes just closes the viewfinder window. The red light on the left side used to change to green when pushed also.

like JP said how come real camera was able to use the volume buttons to zoom and silent button to take pictures(which is a horrible.. should just be one of the volume buttons to take a pic).. you should definitely bring this up with apple.

It very clearly states “full access to still and video camera data”. Am I wrong in understanding that to mean you now have full access to read/write EXIF & GPS data? Meaning you should be able to read in a photo from the camera roll, and it not be stripped of it’s metadata. Likewise you should be able to save out to the camera roll with all included metadata.

Also you say that all the metadata will be sent when you share on Flickr. I’m curious if that’s metadata recorded at the moment of capturing the image, or if it’s metadata recorded at the moment of uploading to Flickr? If it’s the former, I guess as long as we don’t want to back up our photos on our computers, we could just not save them to the camera roll and it be somewhat of a workaround for the metadata issue. Maybe you could add DropBox support and let us export to that with all the metadata?

But if it’s the latter, as it has been previously with photo uploaders, it’s a rather useless feature. Unless I immediately upload a photo I just snapped to Flickr, the capture time/date, and location are going to be wrong. They’ll be set at the point when and where I upload, and that could be hours, even days after I actually snapped the shot. Particularly egregious for something like a road trip where you may not even be remotely near where you were, even shortly after taking the shot.

That all said, I love the new drag focus, and separate exposure control. That’s freaking brilliant, and really the only thing keeping me from replacing the default camera app on my dock with Camera+ is the current lack of metadata handling.

If I had to think of new features (aside from the obvious metadata issue) for upcoming versions, I would say we should have an option to immediately go into shooting mode when we launch Camera+. The eye candy is nice, but if it makes me miss a shot because I had to wait and take another step before being able to shoot, then it’s a point of frustration. I know there’s the little shutter button to the right of the “viewfinder”, but A) you don’t get the awesome new focus and exposure control, and B) it doesn’t appear to be working in 1.2. It blacks out the viewfinder, but doesn’t take a picture.

The other feature I’d love to see added is when taking a shot, not only does it add the picture to the lightbox, but it also saves that picture to the camera roll. That way when I go into the lightbox and edit a picture, then save it, it’s saving a copy/duplicate, and preserving the original “as shot” image. Either save to the camera roll immediately, or when making edits and you hit the save button, it saves the “as shot” version, and the edited version. I may not be entirely happy with the edit once I get it on my big monitor, and want to re-work it in Aperture. To do that now, I have to take the shot, copy and paste it from within the lightbox, edit one, and then save all. Does it work? Sure. Is it a pain in the ass? Oh, most definitely. Frankly, with a photographer endorsing/working with you guys on this, I’m kind of shocked it doesn’t already work this way to begin with.

Hi!
Same here, don’t understand why you can’t save a copy to the Camera Roll… As with ProCamera, which combines filter effects, photos are getting stored directly to the camera roll, so that I can plug my iPhone to the computer and transfer pics instantly…

- I agree with the commenters how suggest to remove the viewfinder mode. Just go directly to camera mode and add a button to switch to the lightbox.

- After updating the iPhone 4 to iOS 4.1 Beta, the camera “live view” stopped working. It shows a static picture (grabbed when the App starts). I know this is an “early adopter” problem, but it may persist one iOS 4.1 is released…

@Phil I’m having the same problem importing pictures using iPhoto, in fact, any app I try including Image Capture and Picassa cannot thumbnail any image which Camera+ transfers to the camera roll, thumbnails only appear for pictures taken with the native camera app.

I have tested this with several other camera apps and it seems like it is an issue with any non native app saving pictures to the camera roll, they all “break” the thumbnails in iPhoto although they are still able to be imported without a problem.

So it seems this is a problem with the iPhone software, or some restriction placed on images saved to the camera roll from third party apps…either way, it would be nice if the issues was acknowledged and addressed in some way?

@Phil
I’m having the same trouble. 3Gs, OS4, Snow Leopard. I’m seeing more than what @Chris is seeing as I get a blank screen when I try to edit the imported photos in iPhoto as well as the missing thumbnails. I know, why would you edit in iPhoto? It was a test to see what would happen.

I find this quite frustrating as we use iPhoto for managing our photos and I wanted to use my iPhone more for taking candid shots of the family. You know, the precious moments and unexpected things.

I would really like to know what the source of the problem is and how to work around it.

I just purchased Camera+, and am using version 2.1.1 and am using an iPod touch (ver.4.2.1). When I touch the screen to take a picture I only see the exposure button, not the focus button. What am I doing wrong???